AQUAXYL in the AMAAN cleanser: how skin holds on to water
Written by Hussam Aitelqadi · Founder of AZOURANE · Sarajevo
One ingredient doing two jobs
We keep to one rule when we decide what goes into a formula. Few ingredients, and every one of them doing real work. That rule comes from two places. From the cooperatives in Souss-Massa, where my family is from, where women have worked argan by hand for decades with few tools and a great deal of knowledge. And from the boxes of cream I worked through myself, where ten ingredients sat on the list because they sold the product, not because skin got anything out of them.
AQUAXYL answers that rule. It binds water and the lipid components of the skin at the same time, instead of needing a separate ingredient for each job. A shorter list, the same work.
In the AZOURANE line, AQUAXYL sits in the AMAAN cleanser. Here is what it is and how to recognise it.
What most ingredients do
Most hydrating ingredients do one job. Glycerin pulls moisture from the deeper layers up toward the surface. A plant oil smooths and fills the space between corneocytes. Squalane seals the top. Each does its own part, so a formula stacks three to five of them to cover the whole chain.
AQUAXYL takes another route. Its derivatives bind both to water and to the lipid components of the stratum corneum, so one ingredient covers ground that would otherwise take several.
What AQUAXYL is
AQUAXYL is the trade name for a complex of three sugar derivatives: xylitol, xylitylglucoside and anhydroxylitol. It is made by Seppic, a French cosmetic active ingredient company, and it has been in the industry since 2006.
Chemically, xylitol is a five carbon sugar alcohol found in fruit and in birch bark. Its glucoside and anhydro derivatives, which make up the rest of the complex, bind at once to water and to the lipid components of the stratum corneum, the outer horny layer of skin, roughly 15 to 20 microns thick.
In practice it comes down to one thing: skin holds on to the water it already has.
How to spot AQUAXYL on an INCI list
AQUAXYL appears on an INCI list under the names of its three parts:
- Xylitylglucoside
- Anhydroxylitol
- Xylitol
If all three appear together, the product uses the AQUAXYL complex. If xylitol stands alone, as it often does in toothpaste or in some sweet extracts, that is not AQUAXYL. It is a sugar alcohol doing a smaller job.
Seppic recommends its ingredient at 1 to 3 percent of a finished product. That number is useful when you read someone else's label: if those three names sit right at the bottom of the list, behind the fragrance and the preservative, there is probably too little of them to change anything.
Where AQUAXYL sits in the AZOURANE line
All three names are on the INCI list of the AMAAN cleanser, alongside glycerin and aloe vera juice. That is why AMAAN does not do only one job. It takes off makeup and the day's grime, and it helps skin keep hold of water instead of leaving it tight after a wash.
The rest of the formula pulls the same way. The surfactants are coco glucoside and cocamidopropyl betaine, the mild glucoside and amphoteric class, and the pH sits between 5 and 5.5, inside skin's own range. That is why you can use it several times a day without washing your face down to a tight feeling. It smells of cucumber, fresh.
If you want a final layer to seal in what AMAAN left behind, that is 100% argan oil. First press. A few drops are enough. It absorbs quickly and leaves skin soft and smooth.
There is more on argan on the Ingredients page. For the story behind AZOURANE and the cooperatives our raw materials come from, read Our story.
One clever ingredient is often worth more than ten fighting for room in the same bottle.
